| I'll attempt to add to this. I might be stating things that are a bit controversial here. 1 thing we are always transparent with users about is how our business model works. 1 of my favorite videos on the internet about this is [1]. We are very much based on closed source for making revenue. This has actually helped with our community a lot. We are basically focused on closed source solutions for specific verticals. The only way to get clients to pay is to make something more efficient or don't open source/core it. For open source companies there is always a trade off of community vs customers. You have to find a hard line and stick to it. Community is great, but most of those people won't want to pay you. You can try to convert them, but that takes a lot of time and isn't the best path to market.
We strive to provide a great base line experience to our users, but a few of the things we have found in practice that helps: 1. Features have customer names on them 2. There's a mass of community interest in a specific feature You have to be careful about where time is spent.
It's very easy to mistake "users" for "customers". I wish slava and co the best of luck and really appreciate their post mortem. 1 thing we've learned as an infra company is "be as close to the app as possible". In our case the bulk of what we focus on is banking/telco anomaly detection. It's a straight forward revenue making product that can benefit from deep learning. The great thing is we can grow in to other use cases later on if we find something else interesting to work on. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8 |
Even seen this backfire at many commercial companies. Adding whatever features a company is willing to pay for will often pull a product in multiple, incompatible directions.